Ethereum’s Mainnet Shadow Fork 10 Goes Live Ahead of September Merge

Ethereum’s tenth shadow fork went into effect yesterday, 26 hours earlier than expected, as the network continues to run tests ahead of the anticipated merge from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. In preparation, Ethereum has been undergoing a series of test forks which copy data from the main network (mainnet) to a test environment network (testnet).

Yesterday’s shadow fork occurred at 11:45 UTC when Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) was overridden at 54,892,065,290,522,348,390,492 at block 15217902.

The shadow fork brings the project one step closer to Ethereum’s mainnet upgrade in September. The third and final testnet merge, Goerli, is expected to happen August 10.

Ethereum DevOps Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi told CoinDesk that this shadow fork will test releases that approximate the releases that will be used in the Goerli merge.

As for why it happened earlier than expected, Jayanthi said that there was a clear change in the hashrate that could have sped up the process.

This will not be the last mainnet shadow fork, and Ethereum will continue to run mainnet shadow forks until the Merge.

No significant glitches have been reported.

Read more: Merge Testing on Ethereum: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

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